“No worries.” I watched as Helen Pickett scribbled something on the clipboard. “I’m impressed that you can do that without spilling.”
“What— Oh, this.” She gave me a smile. She was fifty or so, with pale, freckled skin and curly red hair streaked with white. “Social work is powered by coffee and clipboards.”
“Can you tell me about his arrest?”
She stuck her pen in her mouth and flipped a few pages. “Not really,” she said around the pen. Then she took it out of her mouth and repeated herself. “Not really. Says here he was brought in for disorderly conduct.” She looked at me over the rims of her glasses. “Which could mean pretty much anything. But apparently once they took him to the substation, he refused to give his name and continued to be argumentative. That’s when they shipped him to us.”
“His injuries, I hope those were sustained prior to the arrest?”
“That’s what the officer said. I know it seems hard to believe that he was walking around like that, but I can tell you that I had him in my office and I didn’t have a clue anything was wrong until he threw up on my desk.”
“So now what’s going to happen, as far as his arrest goes?”
Helen Pickett glanced into Aiden’s room, where Nadine was now sitting quietly in a bedside chair, face pressed against praying hands. “Now that we know who he is, I’m sure he can be released to his mother. Disorderly conduct isn’t exactly worth a stint in juvie.”
It wasn’t, but I very much wanted to know the circumstances around the arrest.
* * *
“I know it’s not exactly the Ritz, but it’s free and it’s safe.”
Kez stood in the middle of a suite at the East Side Motor Lodge with her arms spread wide. She lived in the room next door as a part of her arrangement with the management of the place—room and board in exchange for providing security for the place. It was a bit of an upgrade for her; when we’d met, earlier in the year, she was working twelve-hour shifts at the front desk. Generally, the visits people made to the East Side Motor Lodge were of the short-stay variety and nobody wanted any trouble, but every now and then she got to threaten someone with a metal baseball bat and/or a gun.
“Is it?” Nadine kept looking furtively through the curtains that flanked the motel room door.
“Is somebody out there or are you just low-key racist?”
“Excuse me?”
“Black people live in this neighborhood. Get used to it.”
Nadine flushed bright red and paced into the adjoining living room, where her daughter was eating Boston Market carryout in front of the television.
Kez perched on the edge of the desk. “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan is, she needs a place to stay until her kid is out of the hospital. After that, we’ll have to see what she wants to do.”
“I meant more in an immediate way. Tonight.”
“Oh.” I looked at my phone, surprised that it said seven o’clock. It felt like at least midnight tomorrow by that point. “I want to find out what her son was doing when he got arrested. And I want you to keep her company. Peter Novotny will come over and take a shift in the morning.”
The three of us—Kez, Petey, and me—made a very unlikely law enforcement trio. The age gap alone was some fifty years. But we worked well together.
“Why’s she need a babysitter again?”
“Because the little girl already blew her cover once—and it was lucky for them both that I’m the one who found them.”
“You sound mad paranoid right now.”
“Yeah, well,” I said, but I didn’t have a comeback for that. “Can you just do it?”
Kez nodded. “It’s your dime, so whatever.”
I sighed. My lack of a paying client didn’t mean I could avoid paying my team. I said, “It might cheer her up to hear your story. You can fantasize about neutering your exes together. Maybe do an even trade.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“I figured you would.”
* * *
The officer who’d arrested Aiden was one Greg O’Neil, and he was no longer on duty. The sergeant at the substation on West Town Street wouldn’t tell me anything else, not even the guy’s phone number, and I didn’t have it in me to argue.
So I went over to my office to stare at the ceiling and try to relax. But really, I doubted I could ever relax in the office again. Someone had intended to slip an explosive under my door here. This did not create a soothing ambience. What I actually needed was to keep this office as a decoy office, and get a new working space elsewhere.
I wondered if it was too late to go back to school to become a dental hygienist.
After I poured a shot of whiskey and drank it and poured another and drank that too, I committed to the full glass and curled up on the love seat and called Tom. “Please tell me you’re on your way to my office with Chinese food today.”
“Are you currently in the office, or is this Chinese food for someone else?”
“My printer-scanner is lonely.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. A lot. I got fired, I guess. Before I even had the chance to fail.”
“I hate it when that happens.”
“That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”
“I’m sorry. But not that sorry, if it means Toledo is over.”
“So over.”
“Chicken with garlic sauce, extra green peppers?”
“Please and thank you.”
Tom got to the office a half hour later with Ho Toy carryout in hand. “I heard there’s a printer-scanner looking for love in here.”
He put the bag of food on the coffee table and sat down next to me. He was still dressed for work in a pale grey button-down and tie, loosened slightly. I shifted so that I was leaning into him instead of into the arm of the love seat, managing to spill only a few drops of my drink on the ugly upholstery.
“Detective work is powered by whiskey and thrift-store furniture,” I said, burying my face in Tom’s collar.
“It sounds like you had a day.” He gently took the whiskey glass from me and took a sip. “But I’m glad you’re back. I missed you.”
“Ew.”
“Especially the profound sincerity. The way you embrace feelings. The emotional maturity.”
“Tell me more.”
“I don’t want you to get full of yourself.”
The heater rattled on and off and on, and we went quiet for so long I wasn’t sure if he was asleep, or if I was.
Finally he said, “Do you want to eat or was all this talk about your printer just a ruse?”
I unfolded myself from the love seat and ripped open the bag. It was impossible to be in a bad mood in the face of Chinese takeout and its cheery little white paper containers. I got paper plates out of the filing cabinet and sat down cross-legged on the floor on the other side of the coffee table. “I missed you too,” I said. “Now let us never speak of it again.”
CHAPTER 32
Peter Novotny was teaching Katie to play blackjack over orange juice and Egg McMuffins when I got to the East Side Motor Lodge in the morning. “She’s a natural,” he said, “got a brain for probabilities like you wouldn’t believe.”
“She’s nine.”
“Eh, she has an old soul.”
Katie beamed.
Nadine was still asleep in the bedroom, the door closed tightly. Kez had gone back to her own room after Novotny had arrived with breakfast. He said, “So what’s on the agenda for today?”
“Why is everyone always asking me what the plan is?”
“Because you’re the boss, boss.”
“Fuck. I mean, fudge.”
Katie glared at me. “I know the f-word.”
I had to fight the urge to put my hands on my hips and tell her well, good for you.
“Call me when Nadine’s up, okay? I’m going to follow up on a few things unless you need anything from me here.”
Katie’
s expression said it all.
* * *
Aiden was still out of it when I dropped by Nationwide Children’s Hospital, so the explanation for what had happened to him would have to come from Officer Greg O’Neil. I’d never met him, but he knew my father, like just about everyone had. At some point all the cops in the city who’d known Frank Weary would be long retired and I wouldn’t have to deal with their comments about how I looked just like him, but I sure as hell hoped I wouldn’t still be doing this by then. I caught up with O’Neil outside the Roosevelt Coffee House on Long Street, where the aftermath of a three-car accident was just getting swept away.
I offered to buy him a coffee in exchange for information, but he shook his head. “Not hipster coffee.”
“You’d turn down free coffee just because it’s made by millennials?”
“I’m a man of principles.”
I could respect that, so I didn’t press the issue. “You arrested a kid yesterday,” I said. “Sixteen, dirty blond, disorderly conduct, he wouldn’t give you his name?”
O’Neil nodded. He had a thin, whitish mustache like a layer of cappuccino foam on his upper lip. “What about him?”
“He’s in Children’s right now with internal injuries and sepsis.”
The cop’s expression turned stony. “Internal injuries.”
“I’m not saying—”
“Good, because I didn’t touch the kid. What’s he saying?”
“Nothing, he’s still unconscious. Can you tell me what happened?”
His eyebrows knit together. “It was really kind of strange. Middle of the day, I’m headed back to the station for my meal break, sitting over on Third and Broad. The kid pops out of an alley and runs right over to me, bangs on the hood of the cruiser.”
“Seriously?”
“The weirdest fuckin’ thing.”
“Okay, then what?”
“Well, it startled me, to be perfectly honest. First thing I thought, there’s something in progress that he’s trying to alert me to—you know there was just that explosion up the street the other day, right?”
I frowned. “Yes, I heard about that.”
“But the kid is just standing there, banging on the hood and yelling.”
“Yelling what?”
“Hey you, asshole, look at me, that kind of thing.”
This wasn’t making much sense to me. “What did you do?”
“Well, I got out and asked him to step away from the car. Which he did, and he went to the car in front of me and started kicking the fender and banging on the trunk. In the middle of the damn street! I told him he needed to settle the fuck down and he spit at me. So I said, Okay, kid, that’s enough, you’re going to go cool your heels in the precinct lockup.”
I waited.
“That’s pretty much it. He settled down in the car and when I put him in the holding cell he was just sort of quiet. He wouldn’t give us a name or anything. Didn’t want a phone call. Just sat there. I was starting to wonder if something was wrong with him.”
“Starting to?”
O’Neil shrugged.
“Was he on drugs?”
“He didn’t seem like it. I mean, the erratic behavior, sure. But I got a look at his eyes, pupils were normal.”
“Any visible injuries?”
He touched his eyebrow. “A small cut, here. It wasn’t even bleeding.”
“Okay, so you put him in the holding cell and he won’t give you his name.”
“That’s basically that. He sat in there for a couple hours. Eventually my sergeant said we should ship him over to the JDC and they could figure out who he belonged to. I told you, the whole thing was strange. It was almost like he wanted to get arrested.”
I thought about that. Why would you get arrested on purpose? To escape someone or something, maybe; if you have a tail on you, a holding cell is a pretty good place to shake it. Similarly, being locked up is a failproof alibi. “And you didn’t see anything out of the ordinary on the street? Nobody following him, or some kind of scene he was trying to get away from?”
“The only thing out of the ordinary I saw was him.”
“And where were you, exactly?”
He rubbed at his mustache. I almost expected it to smear off. “Third and Broad, but you know how it backs up there sometimes. I think I was by the hotel, the Renaissance.”
“So Third and Gay?” My office was a half a block from that intersection.
“No, must have been Lynn, where he came from. One-way street. I was right about there.”
“Okay, thanks.”
* * *
The security man named Darren was on medical leave; he’d been working the evening of the explosion and had subsequently had a minor nervous breakdown. His replacement was a rent-a-cop from a security service and he didn’t bat an eye at the idea of showing me the security cameras from yesterday morning. He even let me sit behind the desk; he walked a post across the tiled lobby.
“Just don’t delete anything. I’m not allowed to delete anything!”
“Okay, I won’t delete anything.”
I clicked around the jerky old closed-circuit system, which took several seconds to refresh between frames. I could tell I was going to be here for a while. But I hadn’t been at it too long when the doors of the building opened and Detective Mariella Zervos came in.
“Um, hello,” she said to me. “New career?”
“Yes, that’s it exactly.”
“Tom said you were back in town. Mind chatting for a few minutes?”
I pulled myself away from the security camera and we went up to my office. I said, “Are you any closer to figuring out who left the Tanzanite or whatever?”
“Tannerite. And, no. Not really. I wanted to talk about something else.”
“Shoot.”
“I said something the other day. That I shouldn’t have. It’s been driving me crazy ever since. About Andover. Andy.”
I saw the police academy picture in my mind, the young woman who looked just like my dead aunt. “Tell me.”
“Your dad liked to drink.”
“No shit.”
“He liked to drink, and when he drank, he liked to talk.”
That hadn’t been my experience of him, but whatever. “Okay.”
“There was a woman in the narcotics bureau a long time ago, a very attractive gal named Lenore Chisholm. People used to speculate about her, you know, a lot.”
I didn’t specifically know what she was hinting at, but I got the gist and motioned for her to continue.
“Frank told a few of us one night that he’d slept with her. Nobody believed him. He said she’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
“That’s an awfully fucked-up thing to brag about. How do you even know it was true?”
“Well, I saw Lenore at Frank’s funeral and she said something. And then this past year, my son became friends with this girl, Lenore’s daughter, at the police academy. So I met her a couple times and it’s just, wow. Just like you. The eyes, you know? Anyway, her name is Blair Andover. I just figured you should know.”
“Does she know? About Frank?”
“I don’t know. So please don’t go, you know.”
“Please don’t go dumping this shit on her like you did to me?”
“Hey, you said tell me. You could’ve let it go.”
Nothing was funny, but I laughed. “Let it go?”
“Not everything is your business. I wish it hadn’t been mine. And I am sorry about bringing it up in the first place. But I didn’t want you to be wondering, you know?”
“Well, thanks. Thanks so very much. I certainly wouldn’t want you to feel uncomfortable about spilling the beans, not when I could feel uncomfortable instead.”
“You aren’t mad at me. You’re mad at Frank.”
I stood up and pointed at the door. “Are you done?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Fine, I’ll leave.”
I stalked out into the hallway an
d stabbed the elevator call button. To my chagrin, Zervos joined me there a beat later and we were forced to ride down four floors in the most awkward silence imaginable.
I could feel my pulse pounding at my temples as I sat back down at the security desk. I refused to look at Zervos. Eventually she left and I called Andrew while I looked, unseeing, at the split-screen view shown by the cameras—lobby, front entrance, rear entrance, first-floor elevators.
“Are you calling to say you changed your mind about the tea?”
“What? No. Remember how I told you the other day about cop who kinda-sorta implied that we have a half sister out there?”
“Yes.” There was the tiniest pause, maybe a hitch in his voice.
“What does that mean?”
“It means yes, as in, an answer to your question.”
“Andrew, what is going on?”
“Nothing—”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not—”
“I can tell when you’re lying and I know you know that.”
He let out a tortured sigh. “This is a conversation that should be happening in person.”
“No, Andrew, spill.”
“You know Dad had affairs, plural.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“Mom told me about this earlier in the year. I was going to tell you.”
I leaned my elbows on the desk and covered my eyes with a hand.
“I have no idea what the fuck is wrong with this chick that she would just say something like that, I mean, who does that?”
“What did Mom tell you?”
“Well, I had asked her, back in February or March, I guess, I asked her about Dad’s estate. It just seemed like, okay, it’s been two years, is this ever going to be done? I told you about how I was thinking of going into business, legit business. Even before what happened with Addison, I’d been thinking about that. So anyway, I asked Mom about the holdup and she said that Dad had a lot of complicated debts.”
“Complicated how?”
“The long and short of it is, he got some woman pregnant. This would’ve been when we were in high school, or when I was. Mom knew.”
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